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Tauros and Me

Capture attempt for a Tauros!
I'm aiming for a hard/complex rank, and my signature is in the bottom right hand corner.
Tauros was my first capture when I started playing Pokemon Go again, and it's been my buddy ever since. <3

Capture attempt for a Tauros!
I'm aiming for a hard/complex rank, and my signature is in the bottom right hand corner.
Tauros was my first capture when I started playing Pokemon Go again, and it's been my buddy ever since. <3

I sloughed through what was before you in the backlog just so I could curate this awesome thing. Claimed!!

Hi, Amber!! It is so, so good to see not only new faces in the art section, but new styles as well!! Hope that the wait hasn’t thrown you too hard; we’re just now clearing out our backlog and starting to stay on top of things, so feel free to submit more and you’re sure to get quicker curations in the future!

I’ll be jumping right in with the form here. You have a great sense of Tauros’ anatomy and form here! You’ve got everything present and in the right place, from its three little forehead accents to its bulky form and sloping back. Thicker creatures like this are always difficult to bulk out, but you’ve done a great job. Your style works great for communicating fluff, and your mane shape looks great not only stylistically, but also logically for how the Tauros is sitting; the way it bunches and fluffs up around the bottom of the chest and the folded legs is a great touch.

Gushing over what you’ve done right aside, I want to dip into some more technical things with the form! The first is something very small--it’s about where the right (our right) horn base meets the horn. On the left, you’ve got a nice, sloped shape that helps insinuate that it curls around the side we can’t see. But on the right, you have a much more abrupt shape at the top. I’d give it the same treatment as the horn nearest to us on this fanart, with the ring curling clearly around the shape and tapering off as it goes out of view. The bottom of it might also benefit from a more subtle version of that same treatment depending on what statement you want to make on the horn’s angle!

The second is the positioning of the back leg. While the front legs are a great example of stylized legs still looking correct, the back is somewhat off--the large frontward curve of that rear flank suggests at the leg is folded at the joint, but the smooth curve of the back haunch/rear contradicts that. Looking at reference images for other bovines/similarly-shaped creatures, I think we definitely need a bit more of clear definition on the back of the Tauros’ leg. Here are a a fewreferences for this. Indicating that sort of “(“ crook of the haunch arcing into the “elbow” of that joint, then curving back forward into the leg would be a great improvement to that!

Reconsidering the back of that leg is also a great opportunity to reconsider the front of its contour a bit! You’ve got a nice crook at the top of that ankle’s bend, but the straightness of that area makes the limb seem a little stiff. I’d very subtly shift the contour of it to indicate the joint a little better. Here’s a shitty MS-Paint-with-a-mouse-at-work-pls-no-judge visualization of what I mean. I just did that joint, but it doesn’t have to stop there--see if you can work your way up the limb with some of those tiny contour shifts to change how we see that limb!

With those two things, remember that you also still have freedom with some of its proportions stylistically. You can make it a bit meatier than the examples given, since it matches with the rest of your Tauros that you’ve established as a very bulky boi, which is why for the second one I’m suggesting smaller shifts than what knobby-ball-joints-anime-Tauros has going on.

The last small thing is the shading on the left (our left) horn. The right one is shaded nicely in order to define it as a 3D object at the correct curve/shading for our perspective, but the left is a bit off. This is because of the bottom part of the line being a bit thinner than the part that follows, when it should be the other way around. You’ve got a slight tilt of the head to our left, which should expose a bit more of the bottom of the horn. Our viewpoint is presumably in the middle of the work, so we’re viewing the Tauros slightly from the right, so we should be able to see less of the far left side of that horn. Here’s a visual of where that line should be closer to, though not exact (because again, MS paint curves with a cheap-o mouse are really hard haha). Definitely experiment with that to see what fits exactly.

Moving on to the other adorable form you’ve got going on: your human form is almost perfect in the style that you’re using. Great proportions, great emotion, great joints and arms and legs. The feet and the sandals are great in their depiction at this angle, as are the fingers and hands! Hands in that position are way more blocky than we think in our heads, but you’ve tackled that head-on and nailed it. The fluffy hair flows fantastically! I can only make tiny nitpicks on this part. The first is on the looped shape in the air on the right side. I think it’s intended to be the jumping sweep of a curly bang raising and then sweeping back over to cascade down, but it definitely threw me for a second due to how tall it is. I think making that line a bit more rounded on the left side (so more like a “c” instead of an… “n” is the best example I can find, haha) would help communicate that better! The other small thing is the nose--you’ve got a little triangle shading to (I assume) suggest the bottom plane of the nose, but it looks a little more like a button cat nose since there aren’t any connecting upward lines on it. I think even making the tiniest of crook back upward on the left side of that shape would help clear that up a ton--it can be pretty minute, nothing huge.

Your shading is pleasant and simplistic, consisting of one darker tone for each color. This is fine stylistically, and works great to give a little bit of shape without beating us over the head with it! I think that you might want to shift the direction of your shadows. Your light source is presumably from the sunset and the reflections of the light off of the sea--all light sources coming from behind the subjects. Your cast shadows reflect this, but not the ones on your subjects! This backlighting would mean that most of what we see of your subjects would have some sort of shadow, except on certain parts of their rightward sides that are exposed to the rightward sun. I think you can pull this off with the current colors you have for the shading, but just shifting them around! Some examples of this sort of shading are things like this (note: I was at my wits end trying to search “sunset behind,” “sun behind,” etc and only getting silhouettes of figures, so as a last ditch desperation effort I tried “dogs and sunset” and of course, dogs are a godsend): here,here, and here. It doesn’t have to be darker than what you’ve got it, just moved around, but I think it’d help with clearly defining your light source. If you need more references/examples, feel free to PM me!! <3

The last major part I want to move to is your background. The colors on your sky are gorgeous. You’ve got a nice sun effect with the slightest of orange blurs that communicates its brightness perfectly, and a beautiful blue for the sea. The rest of your background, though, starts to differ stylistically from your spectacular subjects. The transition from clean, soft linework to abrupt, jutting edges on the grass where we can see the rounded edge of the flat green brush is jarring compared to the rest. I think the background is where you need to show the same love and care as you did with your subjects. Your grass tufts seem quick and haphazard. You’ve sunk the Tauros in with a few blades going over it, but these are a slightly different color than the grass it’s connected to, making it feel a little pasted-on. The same goes for the jagged grass lines that define the part against the sea--it’s a slightly different color, and there’s are two bits on the right that overlap onto the Tauros, one right below the tail base and one slightly tipping onto the downward-swinging tail.

On your subjects, you use flat color with very clean, defined spots of shading, but both the grass and the dirt have this uncharacteristic, soft mottling texture that we don’t see anywhere else. We see a bit of it on the seas, but the ambient blues makes more sense there. I would remove this and instead try to bring your subject’s style through the rest of the work. The only other tiny thing is the stars at the top of the sky; I love the placement, since it suggests that they’re starting to fade in but it’s not quite dark enough yet for them to shine, but I’d slow down on their forms a little. Some of your “dots” are swishes (which I’m also very guilty of when I’m trying to quickly “dot” on a tablet, so I definitely understand how that happened). Slow down just a little and dot them a little more carefully, but still with the same thinness and lightness. Your far right twinkle is very nice, cute, and clean without being over-bearing--I think the hastier far left one can benefit from that!

Your background works fine in order to set the scene and round out the image, but I know what totally awesome stuff you’re capable of, and I’m not seeing that same love you gave on the subjects in the background. I think that this would look even more plain freaking awesome if you sat down and took some more time on that background. This one has so much potential!

You’re damn close on this one for your first URPG art attempt--right now, your absolutely fantastic figures have you somewhere at a Hard level, one rank below the complex you need to be at. So as it stands, Tauros isn’t captured--BUT! IT IS SO ON TRACK!! This is exactly what you should do to bring this right up to complex:

Take a look into the Tauros anatomy pieces that I mentioned--namely, the base of our right horn, and the shapes of that back leg

Shift the shadows on your subjects to reflect the backlighting. They don’t need to be darker than they are now--you can use your same shadow colors, just move them to cast on more of the left-and-inside portions of the figures.

Re-do the bottom half of the background, especially the grass and cliff dirt treatments. Remove the mottling, and go for that awesome smooth-color style you’ve got going on up-top. I’ll tell you straight up: your Tauros mane/leg fluff (and also human hair) style would make a wicked grass treatment. Take that fluff and apply it to the grassy edge against the sea, and the grass hanging off the edge at the bottom! Instead of single-width blades, tuft up some fluffy little clumps bunched up against the Tauros that’s sitting on ‘em! Shade those lil’ suckers like you did your subjects, with one regular green and one darker on the correct shaded side. And once you have those details, you won’t have to do them everywhere--one or two free tufts scattered in the green space should do the trick.

You get that down, and this’ll hands down be THE CUTEST SHIT, GUARANTEED. I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THIS, GIRL.